• Brookdale Occupancy Hits 81%

    Brookdale Senior Living reported its first quarter earnings results, and it appears to be building on the momentum started at the end of 2024. In addition, month-end occupancy in April topped 81.0%, marking the ninth straight month with ending occupancy above 80.0%. While it is great the company is making progress, there is still a lot more work... Read More »
  • Development Underway for New Fairfield County CCRC

    A new CCRC is under construction in our backyard in Stamford, Connecticut (figurative backyard from our headquarters in New Canaan). Mozaic Senior Life (formerly Jewish Senior Services) is building Mozaic Concierge Living, a CCRC that will offer 168 independent living units, along with assisted living, memory care and skilled nursing. The project... Read More »
  • NHI Raises Guidance in Q1 Earnings Report

    National Health Investors came out with its first quarter earnings and reported modest improvements in several financial metrics from the year-ago quarter. The REIT also increased its 2025 annual guidance range, which investors must have liked, pushing up the share price by nearly 3% in the trading hours following the announcement and earnings... Read More »
  • Oklahoma Hospital Divests to Arkansas-Based Joint Venture

    Senior Living Investment Brokerage continued its May hot streak with two more closings. First, the firm represented a local hospital that was looking to divest its 55-unit assisted living/memory care community in McAlester, Oklahoma, in the rural eastern part of the state. The community was built in 2017 but lagged behind operationally for years.... Read More »
  • CIBC Finalizes Refinance for High-Quality Skilled Nursing Operator

    CIBC Bank closed a $32 million cash-out commercial mortgage refinance related to two skilled nursing facilities in Kentucky and Tennessee. Both are leased to, and operated by, a high-quality, national skilled nursing operator. The two facilities encompass 243 total licensed beds and the buildings each have an effective age of 20 years. The... Read More »
60 Seconds with Steve Monroe: Here We Go Again

60 Seconds with Steve Monroe: Here We Go Again

Investigate, investigate, investigate. Regulate, regulate, regulate. Why not assist? Why not help? Why not try to understand? Liz, Ron and Kirsten, of U.S. Senate fame, have asked the GAO to investigate the assisted living industry and to see if federal oversight is needed. Really? Are we going down this road again? How did that work out for the nursing home industry? As we know, the assisted living sector is predominantly private pay, unlike nursing homes, but the senators are using information from state Medicaid agencies to back up their claims. I suppose I could see them investigating any assisted living community that is receiving Medicaid funds to make sure the money is wisely spent,... Read More »
Sonida Senior Living Grows For The Future

Sonida Senior Living Grows For The Future

The last to report 2024 earnings in our sector, Sonida Senior Living turned in a decent fourth quarter, but maybe not as good as they were hoping for. They are looking to the future, however, and not past performance, and are gearing up for growth.  While the same-community occupancy of 86.6% in the fourth quarter is certainly above average for the industry, the year-over-year increase of just 70 basis points was below average. Many providers are still putting out census growth numbers that will not be sustainable as communities begin to stabilize, so increasing by 70 basis points in the future will look pretty good. But we are not there yet, especially with new development still way... Read More »
60 Seconds with Swett: The Demand for SNFs

60 Seconds with Swett: The Demand for SNFs

We had a fantastic webinar last week that covered our recently published valuation statistics from The Senior Care Acquisition Report but also how valuations, the lending environment and M&A strategies are changing in 2025, so far. Jason Punzel of Senior Living Investment Brokerage, Steve Munn of VIUM Capital and JP LoMonaco of CBRE joined me for the discussion and all had fascinating and useful takeaways on the current state of the market. I ended the webinar with a question about what type of property each panelist would purchase themselves, if they had the equity to finance the rest of the acquisition with debt. Although much of the webinar centered around the seniors housing... Read More »
60 Seconds with Steve Monroe: Here We Go Again

60-ish Seconds with Steve Monroe: So, What’s Goin’ On?

While I did not make it to the NIC Spring Conference last week, my colleagues Ben and Steph were there to meet and greet the record crowd. The crowd included a lot of smiling faces. Some takeaways included the expectation that liquidity is returning and that we will see bigger deals this year. Also, lenders will be putting out more cash in 2025 than in 2024. All of this bodes well for the M&A market.  There was, however, some concern about what the Trump Administration is doing, and what the impact will be on seniors housing and care. And there should be concern. Even though the labor situation has improved, my guess is that there will be fewer low-wage workers around given some... Read More »
Sonida Senior Living Grows For The Future

Brookdale Bucking Historical Trend

Brookdale Senior Living announced its February occupancy results, and it was better than we expected. Month-end occupancy has now increased for three straight months since November. At the end of February, occupancy was 80.8%, marking the seventh straight month that it has topped 80%, and up 20 basis points from the end of January. As you know, the winter months are usually terrible for census, and this year the strong flu has not helped. But Brookdale has succeeded, nonetheless. Weighted average occupancy in February increased by 10 basis points to 79.3%, and that seems to be stuck in a holding pattern as it has hardly budged for six months. The share price jumped by 3.6% on the news on a... Read More »
Sonida Senior Living Grows For The Future

Activists Are Knocking On Brookdale’s Door

Not to toot our own horn (sorry), but very recently we predicted that Brookdale Senior Living’s growing percentage of owned properties would attract activist investors yet again. That, and the continued poor performance of its share price.  It has now happened, again. Ortelius Advisors, which controls approximately 1.3% of Brookdale’s common stock, announced a slate of candidates for the Board that it will propose at Brookdale’s annual meeting later this year. Ortelius, like many other investors, has grown tired of the unfulfilled promises made and slow turnaround at the company, especially compared with the rest of the industry.  The slate being proposed by Ortelius includes six... Read More »